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It is as a result of the pressure that this creates that stars are formed. The stellar nurseries are outside of a normal galaxy, which is usually where stars live.

That makes these 'very lonely newborn stars' that are 'in the middle of nowhere', said Bill Keel, the University of Alabama astronomer who examined the blob.

The blob is the size of the Milky Way, the galaxy that includes the Earth, and it is 650million light years away. Each light year is about six trillion miles.

It is mostly made up of hydrogen gas swirling from a close encounter of two galaxies; it glows because it is illuminated by a quasar in one of the galaxies. A quasar is a bright object full of energy powered by a black hole.

The blob was discovered by elementary school teacher Ms van Arkel, who was 24 at the time, as part of a worldwide Galaxy Zoo project where ordinary people can look at archived star photographs to catalogue new objects.

Ms van Arkel said when she first saw the odd object in 2007 it appeared blue and smaller.

The Hubble Space Telescope was launched into orbit in 1990. The new photo was released by Nasa at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Seattle

The Hubble photo provides a clear picture and better explanation for what is happening around the blob.

'It actually looked like a blue smudge,' Ms van Arkel said. 'Now it looks like dancing frog in the sky because it's green.'

She said she can even see what passes for arms and eyes.

Since Ms van Arkel's discovery, astronomers have looked for similar gas blobs and found 18 of them. But all are about half the size of Hanny's Voorwerp, Mr Keel said.

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'Dancing frog in the sky': Hubble offers a glimpse of the green glowing blob giving birth to new stars